CHINA: Coup

For years, China's commercial airlines  built
and operated with the help of American personnel had flown passengers
and cargo through every kind of weather, across a land whose ground
communications, always bad, were increasingly disrupted by civil war.
Recently, the airlines' main job has been retreat: month after month,
they flew harried Nationalist ministers from city to city in flight
from advancing Reds. Last week, in one of the slickest coups of the
civil war, the Communists grabbed the better part of the
Nationalist-owned airlines.

The coup had been carefully planned. Two months ago, the Communists had
sent two...